The Hidden Superpower of RSS in Social Media: How to Find and Implement RSS Feeds for Anything

Do you wish to make your business travel at the speed of light? Of course, you do! And the simplest solution to your troubles is RSS.

Towards the end of this blog, you definitely would be able to kick-start your content marketing strategies.

Change is inevitable, and in order to keep up with that, you have to evolve strategically.

In 2010, Quicksprout gained an audience of 12,329 online readers and grew their RSS subscription by 243%, that too by publishing 171 blogs in 3 years. This clearly helped them with their sales and boosted their business.

I would back up my statement with McKinsey Analysis which states that subscriptions are the primary way to attract consumers to buy products or services online.

Having a subscription model for your business can get you recurring sales. RSS subscription is the easiest and the most simple way of getting your users to subscribe to your social media channels.

RSS: The turning point of digital marketing

The power of RSS was acknowledged by a small community of digital marketers in 2003-2004. They observed that RSS has the capability to go beyond the ordinary and helped them adjust their content marketing strategies accordingly.

RSS is a web sleuth that detects new content whenever it gets pushed onto a website. Many social media tools have embedded RSS readers that dig out the content from different sources and present them to you in a single place.

That’s one job made easy for you.

Imagine how tedious would it be to open a jillion tabs to read from your favorite content sources.

Time to stop wasting your time and start exploring the web smartly.

Or even better, let a tool be your apprentice that would explore the web for you and relay the latest and the best quality content to you.

Not all superheroes wear a cape after all!

RSS is a superhero that will help garner more leads and a better search engine position for you. It’s not an overstatement, it’s the inherent capability of RSS.

RSS feed helps you create backlinks which will enrich the click rate and hyperlinks to your website, by doing this your page will get high traffic leading to a higher ranking on search engines.

Not only does RSS strengthen the digital marketers’ efforts, but it’s also useful for the end-users who have unraveled its potential.

The Allies: RSS and WordPress

With RSS, you can grow your WordPress site with very little effort. Your job as a WordPress developer is to enable the RSS readers to read the content on your website. For that, you have to publish your content in a structured XML format which is understandable by the RSS readers. The metadata for each item in your content is created and is saved in the RSS feed.

WordPress has an innate support for RSS. Your WordPress websites are naturally capable of creating an RSS feed location for your content.

Among all the apparent reasons to use RSS for your website, one major benefit is that your content becomes portable and your readers can save the content to read in the offline mode as well.

WordPress has made it really easy for you to encourage your readers to subscribe via RSS. By adding /feed/ at the end of a website, you will able to access the RSS feed of that website. Using this feed, the updated content is conveniently pushed onto the user’s channel upon their request.

RSS and WordPress go hand in hand for curating quality content and cross-promoting your own content. This reciprocation of cross-promotion can construct not only your content but the associated blog (source) as well.

RSS for SEO

Search engine optimized content can give your website a significant boost by maximizing the reach of your content. Being in the good books of the search engine is necessary to gather maximum eyeballs. For the search engine to rank your website, it is necessary for your website to be visible to it.

Google suggests “For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS/Atom feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google to keep your content fresher in its index.”

However, RSS doesn’t directly impact the SEO but it still assists indirectly by improving your website’s place in the search engine. RSS promotes syndicated data which may or may not be unique. But, it escalates the traffic generated towards your website which is tracked by the search engine bots and that improves the SEO of your website. The factors for which Google ranks your websites are quite many but RSS is still not to be ignored.

Another point to ponder on is, why does RSS bring traffic towards your website?

The reason is the freshness of your content. Newer content would definitely attract more people who wish to stay updated with the dynamic data. Having a dynamic website could also become a contributing factor to your website’s ranking.

The more RSS subscribers your website has, the better is your website’s rank.

RSS feeds add a forceful SEO value to the source site, where the content is being crawled from. That means you can easily rant about your blog on your website’s homepage by utilizing the RSS widgets.

Email Automation with RSS

Email is the heart of communication.

You can automate your emails to your subscribers using WordPress RSS feed.

It could be done via RSS-to-email integration. That way, when you populate your websites, your emails could automatically be composed and sent to your subscribers.

You can control the content that goes in your emails but this integration automates your emails to a great extent.

Automated messages have amplified the average open rate to 70.5% and 152% higher click-through rate. Along with this upshift gear, email automation also minimizes stress and lets you manage your time & money.

Shift the Radar towards the targeted audience

In the war of quality vs quantity, quality always wins.

The power of a limited but focused audience can only be understood once they actually influence your business. Having a few loyal followers is better than having a thousand followers that follow you purposelessly.

RSS automatically creates a relevant audience which in turn waters your conversion rate. With consistency, you can keep your funnel open for the new audience and multiply your audience growth.

Carpe Diem with RSS

Seize the day.

A phrase from our favorite movie which emphasizes grabbing every opportunity that passes by.

Technically, this is what RSS does.

RSS readers are in the state of total awareness at all times (yes, Unagi!) and whenever something you subscribed is updated, you are notified immediately.

It could be a blog channel that you regularly follow, news sites, companies launching their new products or promotions, or upcoming events.

It saves your time and keeps you informed with the current situation.

The Role of RSS in Content Delivery

If your content is not delivered to the audience, your efforts are not being utilized rightfully.

The marketing trends nowadays stress on automating tasks and nothing beats RSS in automating content delivery to the targeted audience.

If you’re a publisher you’d rather content reach out to people itself than formulating email updates each time. You just let RSS handle content distribution for you. The RSS aggregators collect the information periodically after the time interval determined by the end user and deliver it to them.

It is convenient for both the marketers and the audience to avoid going through a plethora of channels to achieve their quest.

Content Monitoring and aggregation

RSS controls and monitors your content. You can track and modify the quality of the content that you produce or fetch. The increasing or decreasing number of subscribers are the clean-cut indicators of the quality of your content.

This arrow could also be used by the website developers to target the structure of their website. They can optimize their website using the combination of JSON and RSS.

RSS is the better alternative to the social media APIs that we use for integration with different platforms. RSS has a lead over the APIs because it is an independent service that is not affected by the changes applied by the platforms to their services. Another drawback is that the APIs are proprietary and can be changed or modified at any time, therefore, leading to the developers making changes to accommodate them frequently.

Content Curation with RSS

The most undisguised reason to use RSS feed is content curation. RSS grants you the power to curate content from different sources that you deem worthy. In easier words, RSS silences the noise and lets you be the in charge of what you see and what you read.

You can keep your websites or social channel lush with newer information at each moment by curating content via RSS. Fresher content keeps your audience hooked to your channels and lets them discover their desired content.

What tools should you use?

To ensure productivity and time management, many digital marketers and social media managers prefer to use tools that manipulate RSS to curate content.

Up until now, some of the best tools that employ RSS feeds are enlisted below:

ContentStudio lets add RSS feeds from different platforms and lets you discover content based on your source library.

Using the RSS feed feature, ContentStudio lets you automate your posts on your social channels. All it requires of you is to add the URL of the source and schedule the content you fetch from there. This content could be scheduled for your social channels/ blogs.

To add the RSS feeds in ContentStudio, find the RSS feed’s URL address in the page source. Grab this URL and enter in the Feed URL.

Next, you can automate these posts for your social channels by scheduling them. ContentStudio checks the source site every 30 minutes and brings in all the updated data during this time period.

ContentStudio also provides an integration with your pocket and Feedly accounts to bring in content from there.

ContentGems

ContentGems is a web content explorer platforms that let you curate and edit the most relevant content online. It creates a whole stream of content for you which you can consume and share on your social channels. You can add the RSS feed URL for any website which you wish to monitor and track.

scoop.it

Scoop.it is also a very elegant content curation tool that brings the content against your keywords in the blink of an eye. It uses big data to suggest the content relevant to your search patterns and keywords.

Scoop.it also lets you organize your feed with RSS and brings in the latest content. Using this feature, you can also distribute your content across different channels.

Conclusion

RSS feed has proven to be an essential element to strengthen digital marketing. It provides a two-way benefit to both the marketers and the audience.

RSS is widely used by website developers, business owners, digital marketers, and the audience present on social media.

It is the fundamental ingredient that adds quite a flavor to your content. Many websites provide you with a feature to subscribe via RSS. So that you can get notified immediately when new content is published there. It lets you live in the present by presenting you with newer and reformed information at all times.

Business promoters use RSS to target the most relevant audience and keep them engaged with exciting content.

RSS plays a significant role in improving the SEO of your website/ blog by promoting its rank on the search engine. WordPress a default RSS functionality which lets the audience subscribe to the website via RSS feeds.

The inclusion of RSS in the content delivery models have enhanced the content outreach.

About the Author

Fatima, a technical writer and a working professional, incorporates with businesses related to software development and training management, her blogs facilitate people to attain a complete picture of the platform she writes for.

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